ABSTRACT
Prosecutors in Tokyo called this week for Takeshi Kuwabara to be given a seventeen-year jail sentence for the murder of his lover, Rie Ishohata. This was no ordinary love affair gone wrong. Kuwabara had been hired by Rie’s husband to seduce her in order to obtain grounds for divorce. In short, Kuwabara was what the Japanese call a “splitter-upper”. Kuwabara worked for one of the wakaresaseya—meaning “splitter-upper”—agencies that have multiplied in Japan. In the case of Kuwabara, he managed to engineer an encounter with thirty-two-year-old Rie as she was shopping in her local supermarket in a northern suburb of Tokyo. Wakaresaseya is also successful because it enables clients to act out their forbidden fantasies and to have the illusion that they can behave like the gods who “toy with the emotions of human beings”, as Rie Ishohata’s grieving father remarked.
